At this point, ISO 32000-2 has passed its DIS4 vote, but has yet to be submitted to ISO for publication. This process could take the better part of one year based on our previous experiences with ISO with ISO PDF as well as PDF subsets such as PDF/A, PDF/X, and PDF/VT.

You shouldn't expect any commercial generation of PDF 2.0 for a while yet and as such, current PDF clients are somewhat “safe” for the time being.

As far as we know, there aren't anything other than examples of fragments of PDF 2.0 which can be found in the DIS documents.

Publication of ISO 32000-2 is not likely before mid-2017 based on previous experience. Actual applications generating some of the more interesting features of PDF 2.0 are not likely before 2018.

By the way, very few PDF 2.0 features are likely to cause any significant problem with viewers that fully support ISO 32000-1 based on PDF 1.7. Proper PDF viewers are supposed to effectively ignore operators, dictionary entries, and graphic states that they don't know about or support. If your current viewer is primarily looking at static graphical content (text, vector graphics, and raster graphics) that come from typical enterprise and graphic arts applications, you are unlikely to find any issues for at least a few years!

Thanks for the great info - hopefully you won't mind me resurrecting this thread for a follow-up.

Do you foresee any issues with editing PDF 2.0 documents in older versions of Acrobat Pro? Institutions are slow to upgrade, but sometimes have to deal with documents from outside sources that are more up-to-date.

The ISO 32000-2 (PDF 2.0) standard passed its FDIS (Final Draft International Standard) vote and has been submitted to ISO for final editing and publication. This will hopefully occur within the next few months at which point, it is “official.”

Yes, I would definitely expect problems editing PDF 2.0 documents in older versions of Acrobat Pro, although viewing such documents should be minimally impacted! However, this may actually be much less of an impact than the problem encountered when versions of Reader or Acrobat prior to 5.0 opened PDF 1.4 files with live transparency or versions of Acrobat prior to 6.0 opened PDF 1.5 files with compressed object streams and/or JPEG 2000-compressed images. But indeed, PDF 2.0 is disruptive technology although all existing PDF files (i.e. PDF 1.x) should have no issues with PDF 2.0-compliant readers and editors.

That having been said, I don't expect to see many PDF 2.0-compliant documents generated before the latter part of 2018 at best. And with more Adobe customers moving to the Document Cloud subscriptions, the issue of paying for costly upgrades for Acrobat Pro should become less of an issue.

Not anytime soon. These things move slowly especially since apparently (per the article you pointed us to), HEIF is heavily encumbered by existing patents. Typically, such encumbrances are great for impeding wide acceptance since to be in PDF, those intellectual property issues much be resolved first. And of course, one must look at how well such encoding really works out.

Anyone remember how JPEG2000 was going to the savior of image compression … and what a bust it really has been (although not for IP reasons, but primarily due to processing overhead for encoding and decoding).